The Trumpology series of columns are also published on Capitol Hill Blue where I am a columnist, and are informed by my 40 years of experience as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. I worked in Michigan as Mason Mental Health Center director and Middleboro, Massachusetts in private practice. Opinions on Trump come from my understanding of psychiatric diagnosis, psychology, and psychopathology. I consider Trump to be a sadistic impulsive malignant narcissist.

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January 4, 2018

As of this “issue” all non-attributed comments are by Hal Brown, that’s me. What with the number of articles about Trump’s mental unfitness for office having increased exponentially since the publication of “Fire and Fury” and the attendant supporting behaviors coming from Trump himself providing even more proof of his instability, it is too arduous a task to archive all of articles related to Trump’s mental health. Therefore, henceforth this website will be “more from me, and less from them.” For better or worse, as of this week this site will be more of a personal political opinion blog than an archival website. Let me know what you think at halbrown@gmx.com or if have the address, my yahoo email.

Jan. 8, 2018Evening Factoid:Oprah attended Tennessee State University on a full scholarship she had won based on her communication skills. In 1973, she graduated with a degree in Speech Communications and Performing Arts.

Mr. Bannon is not known for second-guessing himself and views apologies as signs of weakness. Nowhere in his statement on Sunday did he actually say he was sorry. But the turn of events represented a stunning reversal of fortune for a man who once operated with such autonomy in the White House that, as chief strategist, he reported only to the president himself. And he reiterated his allegiance in his statement, saying, “My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda.” New York Times article above

​

The deadly serious MSNBC commentator Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, said something that got me to thinking.

“Bannon was an insider in the campaign at the highest level, and in the White House all the way to last August. He was talking to the president constantly – I can’t imagine Trump not confiding in him, including over the Russia inquiry.”

That in turn raises the possibility that Bannon might cooperate. Certainly, there is no love lost between him and Trump family members, notably the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Here’s the salient quote:

“Bannon may already be cooperating with Mueller for all we know,” Painter said. “He has no incentive to cover up for Trump, or his family members.”The Guardian

You may ask if this fanciful speculation is true, why is Bannon playing this major suck-up game to Trump. I think he may be trying to gaslight him so much you could write a movie about it…. Is it possible that Mueller has cut a deal with Bannon which has prompted him to try to get back into the White House and Trump’s good graces?

.

Are Mueller and Bannon now playing a long game of save the country from Trump espionage with the goal of getting recorded evidence implicating Trump and others of criminal conspiracy, obstruction, and even treason? If Mueller can’t obtain an undetectable voice recorder for Bannon to wear, nobody can.

.

What would be in this for Bannon? My own sense is that Mueller doesn’t have a bargaining chip with Bannon because, reprehensible as Steve is, he is too smart to have broken the law. Without his association with Trump he’ll go down in history as a footnote. If he brings down Trump he will be one of the most famous figures of American history.

.

I have a title for his biography: "Revered and Reviled: The Sloppy Man Who Gaslighted Trump.”

I put on a poll:

Jan. 7, 2017

Above, Link to the following which is also on Daily Kos where you can make comments.

For a second day in a row, because of the Michael Wolff book, my morning email alerts from Google News have about 50 articles related to Trump’s mental health. A few days ago I realized that I wasn’t able, and in fact didn’t need to, archive every article (on my own modestly URL’d halbrown.org website) which I could find which referenced or described Trump’s mental health and dangerous psychopathology.

Now, at best I only have time to skim the titles and look over a few articles that seem interesting to me.

One, from Talking Points Memo, had a quote mirroring something I was already thinking as I watched Morning Joy a few minutes ago. Here are two excerpts that sums up my thoughts:

"For public purposes, clinical diagnoses are only relevant as predictors of behavior. If the President has a cognitive deficiency or mental illness that might cause him to act in unpredictable or dangerous ways or simply be unable to do the job, we need to know. But My God, we do know! We see him acting in these ways every day – and not just in multiple news reports from an abundance of different news organizations. We see it with our own eyes: in his public actions, his public statements, his tweets. All the diagnosis of a mental illness could tell us is that Trump might be prone to act in ways that we literally see him acting in every day: impulsive, erratic, driven by petty aggressions and paranoia, showing poor impulsive control, an inability to moderate self-destructive behavior. He is frequently either frighteningly out of touch with reality or sufficiently pathological in his lying that it is impossible to tell. Both are very bad.”

"Again, for our purposes, it doesn’t matter. If the entire psychiatric profession got together and examined Trump and pronounced him entirely free of any mental illness, his behavior wouldn’t be any less whacked or dangerous in a President.That brings us back to the point. It’s really only the behavior that matters to us as citizens. A diagnosis would only be helpful to learn about behavior we don’t know about or predict future endangering behavior. Since we know about the behavior we’re talking about, none of that matters or applies. In common sense, every day rather than clinical language Trump is clearly unstable, erratic, impulsive. In a word, he’s nuts and not well. As citizens, we are entirely able and entitled to make these determinations. They are ordinary English language descriptors that the psychiatric profession doesn’t control and shouldn’t want to control. The entire debate over whether Trump is mentally ill is simply a diversion, premised on the idea that we need either permission or dictation to say he is not able to safely or competently fulfill the job of President. We don’t. The observed behavior is really all that is necessary and all that matters. It’s very clear. "

Fox watch is Murdoch watch, so it is
significant that this is the cover of today's
NY Post.

Trump doesn’t behave the way he does because he’s just a quirky guy who enjoys being the center of attention at a party after he’s had a few drinks too many. He’s not the loudmouthed jerk who goes back home after he dropped his drawers and put a lampshade on his head at the office Christmas party, and wakes the next morning with a world class hangover not remembering much of the night before.

Trump has a severe mixed personality disorder of a certain type. I consider him to be a malignant narcissist — however there’s no need to write about that anymore. If you don’t already know what it is, use The Google.

The behavior (which of course includes words) of someone with a cluster B personality disorder (see addendum) tells clinicians a lot more than what DSM-5 code to bill insurance companies for. It tells them whether that person is amenable to change, or whether it is even possible for them to change.

The literal bottom line:

Trump will never change except for the worst if he has dementia as some experts have suggested, and because he’s not just the office clown, he’s dangerous.

Addendum

Cluster B is called the dramatic, emotional, and erratic cluster. It includes:

Borderline Personality Disorder — Very difficult to treat but often seen in therapy since patients do suffer and often seek help.

Trump: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. — Considered almost impossible to treat, those suffering from it actually make others suffer and do not perceive they have a disorder

Histrionic Personality Disorder. — Very difficult to treat but often seen in therapy since patients do suffer and often seek help.

Trump (significant characteristics) — Antisocial Personality Disorder — Considered almost impossible to treat even when some realize they have antisocial tendencies. Some age out of the more extreme antisocial behaviors, in many instances while they are in prison. However there are many people with characteristics of the disorder like Trump who don’t meet the full criteria.

Trump, considered by many or most of those clinicians choosing to publicly diagnose Trump see him as suffering from a combination of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. Put the two together and add delusions and paranoia and you come up with Donald Trump.

Jan. 6, 2017 If you aren’t addicted to Trump media, here’s what you’ll be hearing about today.

The long-simmering argument about the president’s state of mind has roiled the political and psychiatric worlds and thrust the country into uncharted territory. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to force the president to submit to psychological evaluation. Mental health professionals have signed a petition calling for his removal from office.

What it comes down to is an effort to understand and explain a president who acts so differently from every other person to have held his office. Mr. Trump’s self-absorption, impulsiveness, lack of empathy, obsessive focus on slights, tenuous grasp of facts and penchant for sometimes far-fetched conspiracy theories have invited armchair diagnoses and generated endless commentary.

“The level of concern by the public is now enormous,” said Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine and the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” a book released last fall. “They’re telling us to speak more loudly and clearly and not to stop until something is done because they are terrified.”

Under the Fold: If you’ve been watching the non-Fox news you know that the Camp David conclave this weekend has excluded Jeff Sessions. What you may not have heard is that 20th Century Fox responded to a request and sent the a copy of the Tom Hanks and Meryl Strep movies about the Pentagon Papers, The Post.

Whether it is even shown remains to be seen, though if it is I expect many attendees will want to see it. Hopefully it will be a wake-up call to some of them.

“I’ve never personally heard of a scenario where a screening hasn’t happened,” the 20th Century Fox representative told The Daily Beast.

It remains to be seen, however, if President Trump himself will be screening The Post. After all, the president has a notoriously short attention span, is a Philistine, and once, according to a lengthy profile of the former real estate mogul in The New Yorker, “got bored” about twenty minutes into the John Travolta-starrer Michael (understandable) and switched to one of his “favorite” films: the Jean-Claude Van Damme actioner Bloodsport, making his son fast-forward so he only viewed the fight sequences.

Donkey Hotey deserves an award - the illustration
of how Trump gets his genius intelligence.
It rings true to all the fans of zombie shows
like iZombie and the deliciously funny
Drew Barrymore series The Santa Clarita Diet.

“By assigning to his son the task of fast-forwarding through all the plot exposition—Trump’s goal being ‘to get this two-hour movie down to forty-five minutes’—he eliminated any lulls between the nose hammering, kidney tenderizing, and shin whacking,” the magazine reported. Requests for comment from the Trump White House have thus far fallen on deaf ears—although it appears that they, at present, have bigger fish to fry.

Jan. 5, 2018

Evening - What Hal’s thinking.

Rachel Maddow’s show was incredibly depressing as she enumerated all the way Trump and his enablers have been successful in squashing the various investigations into the Trump and Company wrongdoing.

Then Katy Tur subbed for Lawrence O’Donnell. One of her guests was Jennifer Rubin who got into Trump’s treatment of women. After a scorching diatribe about how Trump treats women, and how he bragged (on Howard Stern I think she said) about how he’d invite the husbands of friends whose wives he wanted to have sex with into his office and ask them all about their sex lives with their wives, including how satisfied they were. Then he’d ask if they wanted to meet up with the girls he was bringing over for sex. Apparently he had a great penchant for seducing the wives of his friends. I have no doubt it gave this malignant equally insecure narcissist great satisfaction in seducing another man’s wife. This is too Oedipal a behavior to even begin to explore in this short space.

All the while as he baited the husband into saying something incriminating, the wife would be listening on the other end of a speakerphone.

Jennifer Rubin said Trump should be rolled up in a ball of wax. I think she was being too kind, even if the wax was very, very hot.

At the start of Rachel's show she showed a clip from The Blob…(to introduce her depressing lead story)… hence my evening Tweet to Jennifer Rubin, Katy Tur and Rachel:

"They all say he’s like a child, what they mean by that is that he has a need for immediate gratification….” Author Wolff summing up what we’ve been saying here for well over a year. Way back when I wrote this I didn’t think Trump had successfully progressed through the stages of psychosexual development in a healthy way. In retrospect, knowing far more about Trump, I think there’s evidence that Trump is like a child, only one who is still rebelling against harsh toilet training (and other unempathic) parenting by throwing tantrums and symbolic feces.

Dec. 16, 2016, Daily Kos: Those unschooled in the Freudian stages of psychosexual development may think that if Trump is fixated in any stage to would be the phallic stage. This is not only a sexual stage, but it is when the superego, or conscience, begins to develop.

However, there is evidence that he is really stuck in a much earlier phase (emphasis added):

Anal Stage (1-3 years)

The libido now becomes focused on the anus and the child derives great pleasure from defecating. The child is now fully aware that they are a person in their own right and that their wishes can bring them into conflict with the demands of the outside world (i.e. their ego has developed).

Freud believed that this type of conflict tends to come to a head in potty training, in which adults impose restrictions on when and where the child can defecate. The nature of this first conflict with authority can determine the child's future relationship with all forms of authority.

Early or harsh potty training can lead to the child becoming an anal-retentive personality who hates mess, is obsessively tidy, punctual and respectful of authority. They can be stubborn and tight-fisted with their cash and possessions. This is all related to pleasure got from holding on to their faeces when toddlers, and their mum's then insisting that they get rid of it by placing them on the potty until they perform!

Those of you have lambasted me because I am a psychotherapist doing distant diagnosis, please and respectfully, get over it. We now have far more information about Trump’s personality based on observed behavior to engage highly informed analysis of why Trump is Trump. Besides, this diary isn’t even a diagnosis. Freud is noticeably absent from anything in the DSM-5.

There is simply too much news today thanks to the "Fire and Fury" book to keep up with on this website… stay tuned… much of the focus of the book and the discussion about it is on Trump’s mental health. Search Google News for Trump and Wolff, below:

Jan. 4, 2018From Andy Borowitz - While most of Trump’s aides reflexively took their boss’s side in the dustup with Bannon, one staffer could not help expressing some sympathy for the exiled former adviser. “To be called mentally ill by Donald Trump—that’s got to hurt,” the aide said.

Among the sources he taped, I'm told, are Steve Bannon
and former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.

Excerpt:

Because Trump’s narcissism knows no bounds the
gaslighter-in-chief may be gaslighted by Bannon,
who knows Trump’s weaknesses better than most.
Link above.

Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book.

Article Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury.

I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?"— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.
↓↓↓↓↓

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.

Excerpt (Highlighted):

A senile Fox News addict — with delusions of grandeur and poor impulse control — has the unilateral authority to instigate a nuclear holocaust whenever he wants. Thus far, he has retained enough humility (and/or self-interested fear) not to avail himself of his office’s most awesome powers, opting instead to defer to his advisers on military matters. But the perpetual conflict between his instincts and their expertise is trying his patience — and his instinct is for war.

Link above.Lee was trained in medicine and psychiatry
at Yale and Harvard, and in medical anthropology
as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Lawmakers concerned about President Donald Trump’s mental state summoned Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to Capitol Hill last month for two days of briefings about his recent behavior.

In private meetings with more than a dozen members of Congress held on Dec. 5 and 6, Lee briefed lawmakers — all Democrats except for one Republican senator, whom Lee declined to identify. Her professional warning to Capitol Hill: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.”

In an interview, she pointed to Trump “going back to conspiracy theories, denying things he has admitted before, his being drawn to violent videos.” Lee also warned, “We feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress. Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.”

Lee, editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which includes testimonials from 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assessing the president’s level of “dangerousness,” said that she was surprised by the interest in her findings during her two days in Washington. “One senator said that it was the meeting he most looked forward to in 11 years,” Lee recalled. “Their level of concern about the president’s dangerousness was surprisingly high.”

A prominent conservative commentator and journalist said Wednesday that Vice President Mike Pence should be prepared to invoke the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and wrest the presidency away from President Donald Trump should Trump's "craziness" escalate.

Bill Kristol, editor-in-chief of conservative magazine The Weekly Standard and a well-known conservative commentator who was one of the loudest voices of the #NeverTrump movement, took to Twitter to posit that Pence has already taken preparations for such a scenario. "Most of [Trump]'s craziness seems so far to have been confined to speech not deeds. But I trust [Pence] has asked his Counsel to prepare a draft document transferring power in accord with Sec. 4 of 25th Amendment in case it's suddenly needed, & that he's discussed this with [Chief of State John Kelly]," Kristol tweeted a little before 8 a.m. Wednesday morning.

"Trump needs to be medicated and hospitalized at this point or he is just going to kill all of us," said a concerned Behar. "My feeling is probably they're getting closer to him in the Mueller investigation and that's what this is about, a lot of it. He'll blow the whole world up so his stupid sons don't have to go to jail."

Though Hostin wondered if Trump had a secret "strategy" going on behind the scenes, she said "we really are in trouble" if he's "just playing a game of chicken with a dictator." She then brought up the 25th Amendment, asking if there is a "mental fitness" problem in regards to the president.

In his first comments since the White House distanced itself from him Wednesday, Trump’s former chief strategist said he supports the president “day in and day out.”

WASHINGTON ― Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is standing by Donald Trump, even after the president on Wednesday widened an extraordinary rift with him in response to explosive comments Bannon made in a forthcoming book.

On his Breitbart radio show Wednesday night, Bannon reiterated that he supports Trump “day in and day out” and referred to the president as “a great man.”

So much news from New Years to today I couldn’t fit it on this page:Back

What a Day For News

Quote: "Mostly, however, the book is utterly humiliating for the enablers, the deniers, the Trump-whisperers, the right-wing media and ultimately the voters who put this character in the Oval Office. Willful denial explains part of it. But what’s the excuse, now that they know who he is, for allowing him to stay? The book should also inform how the press interviews him. We know he’s unhinged, so acting as his stenographer is not elucidating. Seeing what he knows, how much of a grasp of details he commands, how he reacts when challenged and the degree to which his short-term memory may be off is, it seems, where we should direct our attention."

The words of Trump: “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind….

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

The president’s tone also generated a mix of scorn and alarm among lawmakers, diplomats and national security experts who called it juvenile and frightening for a president handling a foreign policy challenge with world-wrecking consequences. The language was reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s boast during the 2016 presidential campaign that his hands, and by extension his genitals, were in fact big enough.\

Washington Post PowerPost

Analysis

By James Hamblin, MD, a senior editor at The Atlantic. He hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk and is the author of a book by the same title.(President’s) decision tobrag in a tweet about the size of his
“nuclear button” compared with North
Korea’s was widely condemned as bellicose
and reckless. The comments are also
part of a larger pattern of odd and
often alarming behavior for a person
in the nation’s highest office.

Trump’s grandiosity and impulsivity
has made him a constant subject of
speculation among those concerned
with his mental health. But after more
than a year of talking to doctors and
researchers about whether and how the
cognitive sciences could offer a lens
to explain Trump’s behavior, I’ve come
to believe there should be a role for
professional evaluation beyond
speculating from afar.

…Excerpts:

THE BIG IDEA: Following President Trump’s tweets can feel like watching a short man drive a Hummer. His fragile ego is always looking to overcompensate. The latest manifestation of that is downright Napoleonic…….. This isn’t the first time Trump has made a thinly veiled allusion to his manhood.During the Republicans primaries, he gave Marco Rubio the nickname “Little Marco” and the Florida senator eagerly joined him in the gutter. “He's like 6'2", which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5'2’,”Rubio said during a rally. “Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands!”….

Trump brought up the insult during a debate the next night, holding up his hands for the audience to inspect: “Are they small hands? He referred to my hands: ‘If they are small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee you!”

from Common Dreams, and elsewhere in the media except sources in the tank for Trump which probably consider this the height of wise and brilliant diplomacy….

Richard Painter, one of our favorite MSNBC commentators... tore into President Trump on social media Tuesday for Trump's antagonistic tweet comparing his so-called "nuclear button" to that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

"Two psychologically unfit men crowing about their nukes. This is not a good way to start the New Year. Congress needs to deal with one of them and the UN Security Council needs to deal with the other," Painter wrote on Twitter, referring to Trump and the hermit kingdom's dictator.

After a short holiday break, the US President is back with a ton of divisive tweets that have infuriated the head of the Council on Foreign Relations

..Excerpt: US President #Donald Trump had a short break over the holidays, but he’s back in full force now with a series of typically controversial and divisive tweets that you wouldn’t expect a world leader (especially one in the position that often gets dubbed “the leader of the free world”) to post if they were in their right mind. As a matter of fact, some mental health professionals have become concerned recently that the President is showing early signs of dementia in his rhetoric.

The MSNBC host went deeper into the danger of Trump, “No one in presidential history has ever played with fire more publicly and recklessly than Donald Trump. Tonight the president is threatening nuclear war with a country the size of Pennsylvania. This is a level of madness never seen before anywhere in the world. There has been open speculation about President Trump possibly starting a nuclear war simply to distract attention from or to use as a cover for dismantling the special prosecutor’s investigation of the president. And no one can say that that is wild and irresponsible speculation.”

Trump learned that threatening North Korea distracts from the Russia scandal, so whenever the Russia scandal news gets too hot, the president can be counted on to threaten to blow up the world. What happens to Trump when the threats stop being taken seriously? Will he escalate and launch a nuclear strike against North Korea to try to save his presidency?

The fact that these questions can be asked seriously is proof that Donald Trump is not mentally fit to carry out the duties of the presidency.

O’Donnell’s call for the 25th Amendment to be invoked was grandstanding. It was a plea for the people to rise up and save their country from the madness of Donald Trump.

“Please don’t make me picture your ‘Button.’”

Over the holiday weekend, Trump made clear he believes two of the dumbest lies of all time. Is he fit for office?

Excerpts:

While I’m completely unqualified to evaluate Trump’s mental health, especially from a distance, we’re clearly entering a phase of his presidency in which someone -- anyone with a reasonably strong reputation and expertise in the field -- should take a close-up, first-hand look at the president because his burger appears to be slipping off his bun. As citizens we have a right to question his fitness for office, and the 25th Amendment provides a convenient means for temporarily -- and perhaps permanently -- removing a chief executive from his post due to one or more incapacities.

↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓

The president believes in outright myths and he’s willing to attach his name, as well as the office of the presidency, to two of the biggest doozies in modern history. But we’ll leave an official diagnosis to the doctors at Walter Reed where, apparently, Trump’s health will be evaluated on or around Jan. 12. Honestly, I’m more willing to believe in a “war of Christmas” than I am to believe that Trump will actually attend his government physical or, if he does, that the results will be authentic. Nevertheless, a licensed physician rather than Trump’s hand-picked Doc Brown in New York ought to provide us with our first real glimpse into the president's actual wellness. We might even get a sense of whether he’s gone bye-bye mentally. Who knows what this will portend for the New Year, but there it is.

Yes, our president is so far gone that he appears to seriously believe in Fox News tall tales and propagandized trickery. Until we hear from medical experts who can diagnose Trump up close to determine his current fitness for office, we can only hope there are reasonable people with the capacity to prevent him from acting on his demented whimsy and bellicosity directed against his perceived enemies -- invisible or otherwise.

You won’t hear anyone saying the banned Bannon words on TV, but I’ve filled in the blanks. (Emphasis added)

Attacking Don Junior: Bannon described the meeting in Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer — arranged by the president's eldest son — as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." Bannon also predicted this of the Russia investigation: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV".'

Hinting there's a "there" there: Per the Guardian: “ 'You realise where this is going,' [Bannon] is quoted as saying. 'This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It's as plain as a hair on your face.' "

Taking his war against Jared Kushner to new depths: Per The Guardian: "Last month it was reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner property empire. Bannon continues: 'It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.’ "

1. Neuropsych diseases generally do not present with any physical symptoms. So, these days and with a few exceptions, it is not necessary to see the patient personally to make at least a preliminary diagnosis, particularly in the face of plenty of symptomology. Flies like a duck, quacks like a duck, its a duck. And then send the patient for (say) brain imaging, as needed.

2. As for the "president's doctor"--There are strong laws about patient confidentiality in general, much less when the president is involved. These days, few question that Reagan was in the early states of Alzheimers the last couple of years. Even his family says this. Yet there was no formal acknowledgement until years later and those years are generally considered successful. But Reagan had enough residual frontal lobe function and concern for his historical legacy that he allowed his advisers to mostly run matters.

Unfortunately, Trump appears to have a classic frontal-lobe lesion that impedes his judgment on such things. How do I know he has a frontal lobe lesion-- among other things, he blows right thru "interpretation of metaphors", a proxy for frontal lobe function in general. This is not based upon a difference of political opinion. Why they pay us the big bucks.

Nonetheless, as with Reagan the adults in the room around him seem to be keeping things in check, for the moment. Mainly by limiting access and taking advantage of the peculiarities of his disease to "work" him. All they and I want is for him to shut up and just act presidential. This is proving difficult.

Again, over on doctor site www.sermo.com (hardly a hotbed of liberalism) it has become difficult to find anyone who will defend the presidents mental status. Typically, such conversations begin "Look, we are all doctors here" and involve "What would you do if a random patient presented to you this way?"

Again, this is not talking "psychobabble", which could just be an actor playing a part. Rather, real neurological signs and symptoms of an organic brain syndrome.

Technical note: This page may not render as I intended it to because of some code copied from the articles I link to.

Just some post-New Year’s levity: This has nothing to do with Trump’s mental health. Or, on the other hand, perhaps it does…

Click above to read article

THE SARAH SANDERS AWARD goes to none other than the award’s namesake, Sarah Sanders for her press conference today.

If you missed Sarah Sanders making the golfing makes Trump even greater claim, hopefully, you’ll be able to catch this in a rerun. She more or less deftly squirmed her way with more a less straight face through her obviously prepared defense of the issue of Trump’s golf that has been in the news a lot recently.

And yet, because of this president’s childish insecurity about the legitimacy of his election, the government has done nothing, and the prospect of action in the next year is nil. The failure is directly attributable to the aberrational nature of the president….. And that’s why this play stinks. Excerpt:

The apocryphal joke is rather crude: “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”And yet I was reminded of it when reflecting on the first year of the Trump presidency because to separately evaluate conventional benchmarks apart from the extreme transgressions of decency is as impossible a task as asking Mrs. Lincoln to assess the play independent of the assassination. The transgressive nature of the Trump era—replete with narcissism, racism, anti-Semitism and what-about-ism—is amplified by Trump’s wholesale assault on fundamental American institutions. His disdain for the rule of law, equality of opportunity, a free press, an independent judiciary, and the professional intelligence and law enforcement communities are, in metaphorical ways, much like Lincoln’s death. How can one possibly assess the play when the denouement is so fundamentally disruptive of reality?

Ignoring Trumpian dysfunction is difficult. So much of the policy that he has adopted might, coming from someone else and seen in that different light, be viewed as a useful course corrective to the drift of the Obama era. For example, though it is outside my expertise, I have long had a sense that American interests are not well-served by the current operation of the United Nations. In another’s hands I would perhaps welcome the new approach advanced by Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Though it is difficult, if not impossible, to disassociate the act from the actor if we were to magically close our eyes to the nature of Trumpian dysfunction, how would did he fare?

Excerpt

(Emphasis added) This brings me to a final factor that has protected the country and its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus from Trump’s tyrannical aspirations: Trump’s personality.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at it. His heart may be in it, but Vladimir Putin he isn’t. And the United States isn’t a fragile new democracy with weak institutions either.

Trump has another personality liability for the project at hand, one that fewer people notice: He is ultimately a wuss. He talks about his boldness all the time, and a lot of people—including his enemies—lap up the self-description. He likes to talk in sweeping, grandiose terms about the things he is going to do and the things he has done. In practice, however, he’s actually very cautious most of the time.

What do I think about and what I do I think about it?

May, 1, 2016

I migrated everything from April to the basement file cabinet, so fitting of Spring, this blog starts anew, unfortunately, again it’s Trump on my mind. The archives for the two months I have been sharing cyberspace with billions of bloggers are below.

If you are a new reader, welcome. I do this blog alone, but always welcome critiques and ideas from you, I mean you, whoever is actually reading these words.